Hi @smaug
many thanks you for sharing your thoughts! Here is my initial feedback:
The motivation for current neuron design is:
- In order to participate in governance, users have to stake ICP for a minimum of 6 months. Via the dissolve delay bonus, users are encouraged to stake for longer times, which translates into higher voting power and voting rewards.
- This structure provides an incentive for users to vote in the long-term interest of the IC.
If we now abolish the minimum lock-up, as you suggested, we would loose this incentive, which I would find concerning. For example participants could vote in arbitrary ways and immediately sell their tokens, without bearing the consequences of their decisions. Also what would we gain from your perspective?
The underlying idea of this point seems sound to me. In the long run, we could consider linking voting rewards in some ways to the amount of burned cycles in a given time period (presumably minus the node provider rewards). Given that the IC is currently in a ramp-up phase with rapid growth, I would think that such a mechanism could be phased in slowly over time.
There is already a separate discussion thread on node provider rewards here. The latest proposal, in a nutshell, is to proceed in phases. Ad-interim, for generation-two hardware nodes, it is suggested to determine node provider rewards similar to the generation-one node rewards, but with a lower risk premium given that the IC platform is now established. In addition, we require a thorough review and discussion on a broader update.